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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a